Plenty of info on the huge fraud:

http://rottendenmark.blogspot.com/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Something Is Rotten In Denmark

By Sara S. DeHart, Ph.D.

Online Journal Contributing Writer

11-20-4

 

Dr. Stephen Freeman is a University of Pennsylvania professor whose

expertise includes research methodology. In a recent paper titled The

Unexplained Exit Poll Data he reports that the International Foundations

sponsored an exit poll in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia during

their November 2003 parliamentary election and projected a victory for the

main opposition party. [1] Exit poll data is considered so robust that when

the sitting government counted the votes and announced that its own slate

of candidates had won, supporters of the opposition stormed the Parliament,

and the president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, resigned his office under

pressure from the United States and Russia. [2]

 

Contrast that event with what happened in the United States in the recent

national election when in three battle ground states, Ohio, Pennsylvania

and Florida, with data based on exit polls predicted an outcome in variance

with the tallied vote outcomes. Major news organizations, including CNN

changed their exit poll data to conform with the tallied outcomes, most of

which came from paperless, electronic voting equipment. In each case the

tallied outcomes favored the incumbent, George W. Bush. The odds for such

an occurrence is one in 250 million for this to have occurred by chance.

[1]

 

Does the phrase, "Something is rotten in Denmark" have any meaning for the

media? In plain language the term refers to a line from the play Hamlet,

when an officer of the palace guard, who after the ghost of the

assassinated king appears, utters the immortal line, "Something is rotten

in the state of Denmark." The term has universal meaning to describe

corruption or a situation in which something is wrong. [3]

 

Freeman Analyses

 

Professor Freeman's analyses of the data are compelling for a number of

reasons. First, he was able to sample 2004 exit poll data that was not

meant to be released directly to the public and was available through a

computer glitch that allowed him to view "uncalibrated data that had not

yet been corrected to conform to the announced counted vote tallies. These

data remained on the CNN website until approximately 1:30 a.m. election

night. At that time CNN substituted data 'corrected' to conform to reported

tallies." (1, p. 3). Second, uncorrected exit poll data have been secreted

in a black box and AP, Edison Media Research, Mitofsky International and

the New York Times have ignored all requests for the raw data. In an open

democratic system or any scientific inquiry the data would be open to

inspection. The fact that it is not adds to the suspicion that widespread

fraud occurred in vote tallies in the battleground states.

 

The integrity of the system is being questioned by citizens across the

nation and internationally. The response of mainline media is a harsh

attack on citizens and writers who dare raise questions about the data.

Robert Parry [4] points out that The New York Times (NYT) has joined the

Washington Post and other major news outlets in scouring the Internet to

find and discredit Americans who have expressed suspicions that Bush's

victory might not be entirely legitimate.

 

What the Freeman Data and Analysis Reveal

 

In the three battleground states, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, exit

polls differed significantly from the recorded vote tallies with Bush

winning and thereby ascending to an electoral victory. Let us examine the

exit poll predictions versus tallied votes in each of these battleground

states combining the male and female vote, weighted for their percentage in

the electorate by state. For example, the Ohio electorate data comprised 47

percent males and 53 percent females. This procedure was also followed in

Florida and Pennsylvania (1, p. 4 & 5).

 

* In Florida Bush was predicted to win by the narrowest of margins, 49.8 to

49.7 percent. In fact, Bush tallied 52.1 percent and Kerry 47.1 percent of

the vote.

 

* It was predicted that Kerry would win Ohio by a sizeable margin 52.1

percent versus 47.9 percent for Bush. The tallied outcome was 51 percent

for Bush and 48.5 percent for Kerry.

 

* In Pennsylvania Kerry was predicted to win by a sizeable margin 54.1

percent versus 45.5 percent for Bush. The tallied outcome was 50.8 percent

for Kerry and 48.6 percent for Bush.

 

According to Professor Freeman, "the likelihood of any two of these

statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of

one-in-a-million. The odds against all three occurring together are 250

million to one. As much as we can say in social sciences that something is

impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and

actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004

election could have been due to chance or random error." [1]

 

Given these discrepancies in the data and the probability that these events

did not occur by chance, in order to document integrity of the process, it

is crucial that the NYT, CNN and other media sources open their books for

public inspection rather than provide questionable explanations about the

discrepancies between exit poll and tallied vote data. While the NYT cites

a report issued by pollsters that debunked the possibility that their exit

polls are correct and the vote count wrong, they provide no data to support

an error in exit polling data.

 

Multiple explanations provided about error in exit polling procedure

crumble under careful scrutiny. For example, the predictions in the Utah

presidential election were remarkably accurate. Exit polls predicted Bush

would take 70.8 percent and Kerry 26.5 percent of the vote. The actual

tallies recorded that Bush received 71.1 percent and Kerry 26.4 percent of

the vote.

 

This was not the case in 11 key states (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan,

Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania and

Wisconsin). In each of these states Bush's tallies were greater than

expected, and in all but Wisconsin, Kerry's tallies were less than expected

from exit polling. (See Professor Freeman's paper for tabulated data

comparisons.)

 

Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman warned that there are many

perils in electronic voting. He posits a scenario in which on election

night the early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then,

mysteriously, the vote count stops and when it resumes, the incumbent pulls

ahead. [5] What Krugman reported is not a paranoid fantasy. It is a true

account of a recent election in Riverside County, California, reported by

Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper, The Independent. [6]

 

Analyses of available data by independent pollsters show some alarming

trends from both Florida and Ohio. In Florida certain counties tallied

votes for Bush that were far in excess of what one would expect based on

Republican registrations. These were primarily counties that used optical

scanning equipment to feed votes into precinct computers that were then

sent to countywide databases. At any point after physical ballots became

databases, the system is vulnerable to external hacking. Colin Shea reran

preliminary CNN data and points out a number of disturbing trends that

include counties where 88 percent of the voters are registered Democrats

with Bush receiving nearly two-thirds of the vote. Other disturbing data

reveal that "according to official statistics for Cuyahoga County [Ohio]

they had a turnout well above the national average. In fact, their turnout

was well over 100 percent of registered voters." [7]

 

Was November 2, 2004, the final act for what began in Florida in 2000,

tested in various locales with electronic voting equipment in 2002 and

finally played out in a disastrous final act that left the media simpering

that this election was about moral issues? That may be true, but they

depict the wrong moral issue. The untouchable topic is that election fraud

rather than gay marriage turned this election on its ear. The media and

politicians would be wise to listen to the voices of dissent and concern.

 

Freeman's Conclusions

 

Professor Freeman concludes his paper with the following statement:

 

"Given that neither the pollsters nor their media clients have provided a

solid explanation to the public, suspicion of fraud or among the less

accusatory, "mistabulation" is running rampant and unchecked. That so many

people suspect misplay undermines not only the legitimacy of the President,

but faith in the foundations of democracy." [1]

 

Neither the people nor corporate media should accept the fact that networks

altered exit poll results to fit the tallied vote numbers. This calls into

question the integrity of other information these networks report. Or as

Andrew Gumbel so aptly states, "As the world's most powerful democracy

talks of exporting freedom to Iraq, it is at risk of becoming an object of

international ridicule." [8]

 

For historical perspective, let us review what happened in the former

Soviet Republic of Georgia when their November 2003 election results

contrasted sharply with exit polls. Both the United States and Russia

pressured the president, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, to resign. Compare that

behavior to what has just happened in the United States. CNN changed its

exit poll data to conform to counted vote numbers under the very eyes of

Professor Freeman and other observers. Meanwhile the media do everything in

their power to undermine the credibility of independent observers. Those

who sound the alarm of voter fraud are summarily dismissed as conspiracy

theorists and traitors of democracy.

 

References

 

1. Freeman, Steven. "The unexplained exit poll discrepancy" Nov. 10, 2004.

 

2. Plissner, Martin. "Exit polls to protect the vote". New York Times,

October 17, 2004.

 

3. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 3rd Edition, 2002.

 

4. Parry, Robert "Big Media, Some Nerve!" Consortium News, November 13,

2004.

 

5. Krugman, Paul. "Too many perils in electronic voting." Arizona Daily

Star, July 28, 2004.

 

6. Gumbel, Andrew. "Mock the vote." Los Angeles City Beat, October 29,

2003.

 

7. Shea, Colin. "I smell a rat." www.Zogby.com.

 

8. Gumbel, Andrew. "Portrait of a country on the verge of a nervous

breakdown." Common Dreams, November 13, 2004.

 

Sara S. DeHart, MSN, PhD, Associate Professor Emeritus, University of

Minnesota. Dr. DeHart is a freelance writer and democracy activist, living

in the Seattle, Washington area. She may be contacted at

dehart.ss@verizon.net.

 

Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal. All rights reserved.

 

http://onlinejournal.com/evoting/111704DeHart/111704dehart.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida

by Thom Hartmann

 

There was something odd about the poll tapes.

A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a printout from an optical

scan voting machine made the evening of an election, after the machine has

read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal computer. It

shows the total results of the election in that location. The printout is

signed by the polling officials present in that precinct/location, and then

submitted to the county elections office as the official record of how the

people in that particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location has

only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus produces only one poll

tape.)

Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile investigator of

electronic voting machines, along with people from Florida Fair Elections,

showed up at Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon of

Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a public records

request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the

precincts in that county. The elections workers - having been notified in

advance of her request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated

November 15 and lacking signatures.

Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not the original poll

tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd requested.

Obligingly, they told her that the originals were held in another location,

the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that since it was the end of the day

they should meet Bev the following morning to show them to her.

Bev showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th - well

before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three of the elections

officials in the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered with

what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me

in a telephone interview less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved

us out and slammed the door."

In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the stinking evidence.

"On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I looked in it and, and

lo and behold, there were public record tapes."

Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off.

"It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added, "because what they had

done was to have thrown some of their polling tapes, which are the official

records of the election, into the garbage. These were the ones signed by

the poll workers. These are something we had done an official public

records request for."

When the elections officials inside realized that the people outside were

going through the trash, they called the police and one came out to

challenge Bev.

Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator, was there.

"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I don't think you'll

ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an

election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled

on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were

throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it."

As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the tussle, she had to get off

the phone, because, "Two police cars just showed up."

She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview, that when the police

arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits of my public records

request."

The outcome of that debate was that they all went from the Elections

Warehouse back to the Elections Office, to compare the original, November 2

dated and signed poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the Elections

Office had submitted to the Secretary of State. A camera crew from

www.votergate.tv met them there, as well.

And then things got even odder.

"We were sitting there comparing the real [signed, original] tapes with the

[later printout] ones that were given us," Bev said, "and finding things

missing and finding things not matching, when one of the elections

employees took a bin full of things that looked like garbage - that looked

like polling tapes, actually - and passed by and disappeared out the back

of the building."

This provoked investigator Ellen Brodsky to walk outside and check the

garbage of the Elections Office itself. Sure enough - more original, signed

poll tapes, freshly trashed.

"And I must tell you," Bev said, "that whatever they had taken out [the

back door] just came right back in the front door and we said, 'What are

these polling place tapes doing in your dumpster?'"

A November 18 call to the Volusia County Elections Office found that

Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe was unavailable and nobody was willing to

speak on the record with an out-of-state reporter. However, The Daytona

Beach News (in Volusia County), in a November 17th article by staff writer

Christine Girardin, noted, "Harris went to the Department of Elections'

warehouse on State Road 44 in DeLand on Tuesday to inspect original Nov. 2

polling place tapes, after being given a set of reprints dated Nov. 15.

While there, Harris saw Nov. 2 polling place tapes in a garbage bag,

heightening her concern about the integrity of voting records."

The Daytona Beach News further noted that, "[Elections Supervisor] Lowe

confirmed Wednesday some backup copies of tapes from the Nov. 2 election

were destined for the shredder," but pointed out that, according to Lowe,

that was simply because there were two sets of tapes produced on election

night, each signed. "One tape is delivered in one car along with the

ballots and a memory card," the News reported. "The backup tape is

delivered to the elections office in a second car."

Suggesting that duplicates don't need to be kept, Lowe claims that Harris

didn't want to hear an explanation of why some signed poll tapes would be

in the garbage. "She's not wanting to listen to an explanation," Lowe told

the News of Harris. "She has her own ideas."

But the Ollie North action in two locations on two days was only half of

the surprise that awaited Bev and her associates. When they compared the

discarded, signed, original tapes with the recent printouts submitted to

the state and used to tabulate the Florida election winners, Harris says a

disturbing pattern emerged.

"The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we

examined," said Bev, "and most of those were in minority areas."

When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in precinct after precinct

were random, as one would expect from technical, clerical, or computer

errors, she became uncomfortable.

"You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she said. "We're not

trying to change the outcome of an election, just to find out if there was

any voting fraud."

That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored

George W. Bush. Every single time."

Of course finding possible voting "anomalies" in one Florida county doesn't

mean they'll show up in all counties. It's even conceivable there are

innocent explanations for both the mismatched counts and trashed original

records; this story undoubtedly will continue to play out. And, unless

further investigation demonstrates a pervasive and statewide trend toward

"anomalous" election results in many of Florida's counties, odds are none

of this will change the outcome of the election (which exit polls showed

John Kerry winning in Florida).

Nonetheless, Bev and her merry band are off to hit another county.

As she told me on her cell phone while driving toward their next

destination, "We just put Volusia County and their lawyers on notice that

they need to continue to keep a number of documents under seal, including

all of the memory cards to the ballot boxes, and all of the signed poll

tapes."

Why?

"Simple," she said. "Because we found anomalies indicative of fraud."

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

home